From

Thank you

Sorry

I just got 100mb fiber installed in my apartment for $90/month. Not Cogent's 100mb connection for $1000/month to my office..and this isn't Verizon's Fios 50/30Mb (or more common 5Mb) Internet that is sporadically being laid all over the US either.

You see, I live in Paris, France at the moment and for the last six months, France Telecom, affectionately known as Orange, has been offering 100mb download and 10mb upload service for 40/month. For an extra 20/month, I get 100Mb up. At that rate, why not?

While I am currently living in a bandwidth Utopia, it took me a long time to get here. The fiber plans were announced in June of 2007. I ordered it a few days after - as soon as I got my new address. As is everything French it seems, the process was bloated with bureaucracy and blunders by the administration. After 6 months of waiting (my lease is 1/2 up!), hours on the phone and many failed attempts, a multi-cultural crew of four technicians was able to get the fiber running properly.

My previous connection through Orange was 20Mb down/1Mb up DSL connection so I was used to speed, however this is a whole new level. I can:

Download the 1.1GB full Xcode Installer in around 5 minutes

Download a 1.5GB high-definition 1 hour long TV show in 10 minutes, it streams almost instantly.

Host HD movies that I shoot on my server that play for my family and friends in the States

Put all of my MP4 movies online for playing with an iPod Touch or iPhone. Also my iTunes music library is permanently online

Download Linux distros and VMWare VMs quickly

It is really a media powerhouse.

Unfortunately, there are limitations. Because of the Orange Network routing policies, my 100Mb stops at France's borders. When I upload things to England, I only get about 75Mb upload speeds. By the time I get to the States, the speed is down around 25Mb. This isn't a huge problem for a couple of reasons:

25Mb is still pretty fast - especially as an upload speed

its 25Mb per stream, so when I am torrenting a movie (legally, from Vuze for instance), I can still get darn close to the theoretical maximum downloading speeds when it comes from multiple sources

I rarely need all the speed from one location.

Big media companies are putting their servers around the globe (see Akamai) so that I can enjoy the full speed of my connection.

So, with this great speed at the hands of most of the French city-dwellers, perhaps Parisians will be known less for their breads and cheese (and strikes) and more for their absurdly fast broadband? Maybe not just yet - but check out the Speedtests that I got!